Metacritic reviews

Trueba excels at those well-meaning, exquisitely realized, vividly acted human dramas. “Memories” translates those sensibilities to South America, and even if the product can’t exactly be seen as rousing, one can’t entirely resist its affecting charm.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

Cámara holds the film together and touches us with the moments we see him teaching important things like compassion and responsibility to his son.

Adapted from a popular memoir by the late doctor’s son, Trueba’s film overcomes its ham-fisted clumsiness because it goes a step beyond hagiography. It’s a story filtered through the eyes of a grieving son in complete awe of his father, one told with enough warmth and detail that it could be easy to forget its memories don’t belong to the filmmaker himself.

Memories of My Father is a touch overlong and soapy and awkwardly structured. But it’s still an engrossingly watchable drama.

Trueba keeps things moving within and between eras in a graceful, affectionate, assured way that’s always enjoyable, even if the film overall seems a bit frivolous given its larger themes.

Above all, there is the generous, often mischievous performance by Cámara, with a promisingly vivid juvenile lead from Nicolas Reyes as young Quinín, and a nice ensemble buzz from other family members, including Patricia Tamayo as mother Cecilia; otherwise it all comes across as a fondly soft-focus blur.

Too much of the film (an official selection at 2020’s Cannes Film Festival and Colombia’s entry in the 2021 Oscar race) lacks sufficient conflict and an organic sense of storytelling.

There’s something inherently unsatisfying about the film’s ambling structure, as the first hour flies by and nothing of great import has really happened.

Perhaps Colombian audiences don’t need the history lesson, but skimping on the context in this case also makes the film’s mawkish impulses more glaring and grating, especially as Trueba shifts his observant domestic drama into something of a political rallying cry — a tepid one, at that.